Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  To Wellesley to Wed

  As she packed her daughter, Nancy, off to Wellesley, Marge Wanderer, a round woman with pink cheeks and hair silvered like frosting, quietly nursed her fears as to the future of her beautiful, ebullient girl. “What we hoped we would get from Wellesley is that we thought it would develop her into a fine wife and a wonderful mother,” she told Frontline in the documentary that aired in 1994. But Marge also worried that Nancy wouldn’t make the extra effort necessary at a women’s college to meet eligible men. In high school, she’d had to press her daughter to put on a bit of makeup and go out on dates. Even after Nancy began dating a man I’ll call Thomas in the spring of freshman year, Marge worried that she would “send him to the shower before he had a chance to pitch a full inning.”

  For all her mother’s worries, Nancy’s storybook wedding at the end of junior year seemed, to her classmates, inevitable. Button-nosed, with her mother’s bright blue eyes and a gap-toothed, sunshine smile, Nancy was her schoolmates’ vision of the all-American girl. They elected her class president freshman year, and chose her over Hillary Rodham for junior representative to the National Student Association (this just shortly after Ramparts magazine disclosed that the NSA had received $3 million from the CIA, a fact that apparently dampened neither girl’s enthusiasm for the post). She planned to run against Hillary senior year for student government president, and believes she might have won. Though it is the rare class member who does not remember being courted by Hillary—invited to join her at a Young Republicans mixer at Harvard Law School or asked to dine in her dorm—“she was somewhat intimidating,” says Nancy. “I think people were more comfortable with me.”

  It was Thomas’s unpretentious ways that captured Nancy’s heart. “He seemed more mature than the others. He was handsome and ambitious, taller and maybe smarter than me—all those things a man was supposed to be. He had this unfashionable haircut, a kind of buzz cut, and a frayed collar. He talked about things besides how many beers he could drink, and invited me up to Bowdoin—not to party, but to show me the Maine coast, where he worked on fishing boats in the summer.

  “Thomas picked the timing—for our engagement and wedding and then for our baby. It was a beautiful wedding, just the way my mother wanted it. We had five hundred people in the Wellesley chapel, four hundred of them Wellesley friends.”

  Nancy had just one moment’s doubt about her choice to take refuge in marriage. “When I began to get politically aware at Wellesley, Thomas belittled me. I went to hear McGeorge Bundy debate the Vietnam War with [Eugene McCarthy speechwriter] Richard Goodwin and was so excited I immediately called Thomas. He was completely patronizing, ‘Oh, Dick Goodwin,’ he said. ‘I knew about him years ago.’ He thought he knew it all. Maybe he did, but I wanted to know it, too. It dawned on me that he intended to do the thinking for both of us.” Gnawed by foreboding, she finally shrugged off her doubts and at age twenty became a bride. “When I told Jan Krigbaum I was getting married, she said, ‘Why are you doing this? You haven’t done anything in your life.’ I said, ‘Oh no, I really love him. I want to iron his shirts.’ I had heard Betty Friedan speak freshman year, and thought, This has nothing to do with me. I just didn’t get that being married so young would limit me. I wanted to be in the Junior Show; it would have been great fun to collaborate with those women, but Thomas didn’t want me to be in it. He said it would distract from the announcement of our engagement. I dropped out of choir to spend my weekends at Bowdoin, then got engaged and dropped out of the race for student government president. But I really didn’t know myself. Marriage provided an answer. I escaped into it with a great sense of relief.”

  Gazing upon her daughter’s seven bridesmaids in their pale blue dresses and the promising young groom, Marge Wanderer knew her every wish had come true. “What she came home with was beyond a mother’s wildest dreams. And I just thought, Wow. Whatever it cost us, it was well worth it, because look what she found at Wellesley. She was a traditional bride, with veil and train, and her mother was pleased as punch because here was the end of a dream. This young lady dressed in white was my daughter, and she was beautiful.”

  In 1968, however, no Cinderella story could be so simple, even at Wellesley. The fantasies about marriage offered in literature and movies and music were growing ever less sentimental and more parodic or dark—in the poetry of Anne Sexton and the erotic diaries of Anaïs Nin (both cult figures to 1960s college girls), in the bad-girl songs of the Ronettes and Martha Reeves. The skeptical female voice then emergent in rock ’n’ roll is catalogued in Susan Douglas’s Where the Girls Are: Lesley Gore’s warning to a boyfriend that “You Don’t Own Me”; the satire of suburban small-mindedness in “Harper Valley PTA”; a preference for bad boys over husband material in “Leader of the Pack”; the flaunting of female sexual appetite in “I’m Ready” and “Heat Wave.” In film, the pathetic spinster—bun-headed and frigid—metamorphosed in 1961 into the beautiful, winningly nonconformist, and nonvirginal Holly Go-lightly, smoking and drinking all night and vowing not “to let anyone put me in a cage.” Helen Gurley Brown took up the cause a year later with Sex and the Single Girl, and then the “Cosmo girl”—spinning glamorous fantasies of the liberated bachelorette, with her own studio apartment and edible panties. Even Barbie, introduced in 1958 when most ’69ers were ten, eschewed marriage and motherhood for an independent life. In 1963, six years ahead of Hillary, Barbie became a college grad, with a cap and gown. By 1969, she had a job, black girlfriends, velvet bell-bottoms, and long, straight hippie hair. Throughout, Ken remained a mere accessory. The doll’s cruel measurements aside, M. G. Lord, in her biography of the world’s most successful toy, makes a persuasive case for Barbie as a “decidedly subversive heroine.”

  Though their mothers’ generation found a sense of common cause in the best-selling Feminine Mystique, and though most of the class of ’69 would eventually read it, no book spoke more directly to these young college girls facing compulsory suburban happiness than Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Heroine Esther Greenwood, a gifted student at a northeastern women’s college, imagines marriage to be a dreary affair “for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s … dawdling in curlers, washing the dirty plates while her husband went off for a lively, fascinating day.” Devoting herself to “baby after fat puling baby” seems an equally bleak prospect: Drained of her desire to write poems, she would become “numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.” As for suburban life, Plath drew on her hometown of Wellesley to describe a journey in her mother’s Chevrolet: “… white, shining, identical clapboard houses with the interstices of well-groomed green proceeded past, one bar after another in a large but escape-proof cage.”

  The Wellesley girls voiced their own resistance to their compulsory marital aspirations with riffs on the college motto. Non Ministrare, Sed Ministrari—“Not to be ministered unto, but to minister to”—is an unquestionably admirable call to good works. But to women reared in the fifties, it also evoked the endless handmaidenry of the traditional home-maker’s life. “Not to be ministers but to be ministers’ wives” seemed to the ’69ers a more truthful rendering of their Latin credo. That skeptical view of their inevitable destiny was the inspiration for the showpiece of their college career, the Junior Show.

  For director Chris Osborne, ’69, the show was her first chance to make use of a new, painfully won freedom. Raised in a “foul corner” of Rochester, New York—paved with strip malls and gas stations and shabby little tract houses—Chris had been rigidly disciplined and confined as a child. Though books were her first love, her father forbade her to read Alan Watts on Zen or J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. His iron rule followed Chris to Wellesley, until Sophomore Father’s Day, when, to the girl’s great horror and shame, Mr. Osborne dropped dead of a heart attack on campus. A droll creature, Chris tells how her dad “quit in front of the whole class” as abruptly as Nabokov dispenses with Lolita’s father (“picnic; lightning”), though she adds almost
in passing that every misery since has descended from her failure to face her pain then. Chris transmuted her grief to wildness—“If my father had been alive, I would never have smoked pot; I would have been certain he would catch me and punish me brutally”—and a detached, black wit that has remained with her ever since.

  For the Junior Show, Chris and her classmates crafted a goofy account of a bunch of natives on an island as remote as Wellesley hoping to be discovered by Columbus so they can “sell their wares” with some “Madison Avenue Injun Guile.” After a brief show of independence, its two heroines arrive at their inevitable fate. Sizzynine, the tribal prophetess, runs off with an incongruously WASP ship astronomer: “No injun brave/could make me rave/It’s a man from a classier league that gets me.… No toothless chief compares with Leif/Blond, with no odor of horse/Really Norse/but of course I’d love him.” She joins the expedition, promising to contribute somehow: “I can cook up a storm.” Meanwhile Jade West, who had been the lone voice of caution—“They’ll either make slaves of us or commercialize us”—swoons for Captain Miguel d’Ivy Leagua, who makes her his bride. Inverting yet again the Wellesley motto, Columbus instructs Miguel he is “not to minister unto, but to be ministered to.”

  A more flamboyant dissent against their suburban future erupted among the precocious feminists in the class. In December 1968, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), including some “parolees from Wellesley,” infiltrated the Wellesley Alumnae Club luncheon and bridge party at Grace Episcopal Church in Brooklyn. WITCH founder Robin Morgan had led the Miss America Pageant protest earlier that year and, with her “coven,” had recently pronounced an incantation on Wall Street, erupting in a jubilant clamor when the stock market dropped five points. Now “disguised” in Villager dresses, the WITCH girls settled sweetly into their bridge foursomes with the Wellesley alumnae, then interrupted their own bidding with cries of “Oh my God, all those years pounding my brains out and here I am playing bridge!” They were there, they explained, “to contact Wellesley sisters, whose witch powers were eliminated when they were shackled in velvet chains and placed in protective compounds,” and, paraphrasing Thorstein Veblen’s theory of the leisure class, to protest “the phallic culture which imposes on women the empty life of a consumer class.” As they were ushered from the church garden by horrified alumnae, they chanted the latest television ad for diet Jell-O. “What’s the difference between a career girl and an old maid?… Nothing!”

  The Politics of Manners

  For girls raised to be ever well behaved and demure, to make such a scene was an insurrection akin to suffragists shingling their hair and baring their bloomers to the world. Flouting feminine behavior and fashion has, in fact, always been a rebellious woman’s first move. Long before they explicitly declared the personal to be political, feminists had recognized that the seemingly private and trivial matters of decorum and dress were in fact weighted with political meaning. Rules about what a lady wore or said or did served to define what a woman could be—capable only of mincing steps, for instance, or shameful in her sexuality and having to be covered or concealed.

  The ’69ers’ fashion rebellion began the first moment they were out of their mothers’ sight. Tossing away their Peter Pan collars and box-pleated skirts, emblems of girlish innocence, they tried on the androgyny and mobility offered by boys’ jeans, the unfettered sexuality of miniskirts, or such antifashion statements as Hillary’s Coke-bottle glasses and unkempt hair. Nancy Gist recalls her classmates Eldie Acheson, who spent winters at her grandfather’s retreat in Antigua and summers sailing and playing tennis with the Kennedys on Cape Cod, and Nancy Rowe, daughter of a prominent midwestern steel family, “rebelling against where they came from” by a willful dishevelment. At the wedding of Huali Chai, ’69, to a young Mormon graduate of the Harvard Business School, says Nancy, the roommates all “wore skirts halfway up our asses,” and Kris Olson, now U.S. attorney in Oregon, “had her hair piled up on her head like a streetwalker.” The whole picture proved too much for the groom’s mother, who wept for three days.

  Several of their battles with Wellesley authorities centered on fashion. In 1968, the girls won permission to wear slacks to cafeteria meals, as long as they were wool, and overturned the requirement that long hair be wound in a bun for graduation. An official history of the college written that year recognized a genuine protest. “A generation brought up by TV … became distrustful of words and images. Students appeared in the dean’s office with bare feet, cutoff jeans and an old shirt tied around the midriff.… This seeming lack of respect was in reality an inchoate attempt to express the very sincere belief that appearance did not matter and that what was important was the inner man.”

  For the five black women in the class, hair was loaded with yet another layer of political meaning. Fran Rusan and Nancy Gist both adopted Afros. “A lot of black women decided there was no longer a need to have the long, flowing locks that were the cultural ideal until 1968,” says Nancy. “I had a long flip, but I cut my hair and stopped straightening it. Only, I forgot to tell my mother. When I got home to Chicago for the summer, she almost died. I had not been at all politicized when I left for school, at sixteen. My parents had bought me a first-class airplane ticket. They were so proud I was going off to Wellesley. It seemed to validate all their expectations of my success, so it mortified them to see me return with a headful of kinky Angela Davis hair. Symbolically, my mother was losing control of me. She is fair-skinned and has pretty straight hair. The whole straightening biz was to suggest that I’d inherited that. I said, ‘Ma, I got kinky hair and I like it.’ I understood that I could put aside all that was involved in the pretense of straight hair, that I could reject that other standard. But even twenty-six years later, when I told my mother that [Attorney General] Janet Reno had asked to meet with me [regarding a job as director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, for which Nancy was later confirmed], the first thing she said is, ‘I hope you’ll do something nice with your hair.’ ”

  Men, of course, also rebelled in the sixties against what Eldridge Cleaver called “their old crew-cut elders who don’t dig their caveman mops.” If in the fifties hair had to stay in its place, in the sixties its uncut unruliness would symbolize freedom. But for women such a rebellion was both more precedented and more charged: A woman’s appearance has always been her most vital currency in the world and fraught with social meaning.

  Women’s rebellions against the constraints of fashion are also more likely to boomerang and do them harm. To invest questions of manners and dress with too much attention, even rebellious attention, can drain a woman’s energy and keep her trapped in self-consciousness; in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, such a preoccupation “rivets her to the ground and to herself.” It is the danger ever present in a politics focused too concertedly on the personal—of self-trivialization, the neglect of larger questions, the squandering of whole books on whether lipstick is feminist.

  A preoccupation with fashion also makes women easy targets for mockery, providing more evidence, as historian Anne Hollander has written, of a “distinctively female superficiality and moral weakness.” The 1963 New York Review of Books parody of The Group made just that point: “squinty, pink-cheeked Maisie,” having just been deflowered on a tacky flowered couch (“Mother would have minded the couch somehow more than the event”), puts on her “Lord and Taylor bias-cut cocktail dress (all the rage this year, just as Hitler was threatening to reoccupy the Rhineland) and slips out.”

  Whatever social rebellion women might have thought they were engaged in, politics would wind up a mere footnote to fashion, attention to their clothes and looks eclipsing all else. Coverage of the early women’s movement inevitably lingered over Gloria Steinem’s “long blond-streaked hair falling just so above each breast” or wrote off Kate Millett as an ugly woman who hated men because they never asked her out. “Poor Betty,” The New York Times Magazine said of Friedan in 1970. She would “happily have
traded 30 points on the IQ scale for a modicum of good looks.”

  The Wellesley rebels fared little better. In a Boston Herald story on a rally led by Hillary Rodham protesting course distribution requirements, the reporter linked female disobedience with that other great threat to the American way, ignoring the substance of their complaint and noting only that “they looked like the Bolshevik women’s auxiliary, in their fur caps and high boots, conspiring.” When the young women joined a national student hunger strike in 1967 to protest the war in Vietnam, young men calling themselves “frequenters of the campus” wrote a letter to the college newspaper lauding their initiative. “We like you nubile; we like you fresh. A bit of fasting tones the flesh.”

  “Protest boxy suits,” urged ads in the Wellesley News for Nehru jackets and paper dresses adorned with peace signs, appropriating the groovy new language of dissent in a tactic that would soon be standard on Madison Avenue. “Protest big ugly shoes!”

  In 1968, the Wellesley News vented the students’ frustration at such frivolous treatment, lambasting The New York Times for its regular items on the “clinging Ivy” League, which perpetuated “the revoltingly cute and socially serene image society editors have long assigned to us, all blondes and bustlines, dates and debs.”

  These women were, in fact, behind the times. The fight for “student power” had begun much earlier on most campuses, inspired by the 1963 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley; while many of their peers had moved on to planting bombs and barricading buildings, Hillary and her classmates were requesting, nicely, that the college eliminate parietals. The young ladies overturned a rule restricting male guests in dorms to Sunday afternoons only, with the door kept open, as well as an 11 P.M. curfew, a prohibition against cars, and an official admonition to married seniors not to reveal to the younger students any “secrets of married life.”